


I Should Live In Salt

by acornsandravens



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Beaches!, Dysfunctional Family, F/M, Family Feels, Starks!, Summer Vacation, fluff!, petulant teenager Gendry!
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-08-18
Updated: 2014-08-18
Packaged: 2018-02-13 16:52:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2158128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/acornsandravens/pseuds/acornsandravens
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two weeks, five summers, eight Starks, one father with a drinking problem, and one completely useless Greyjoy. </p>
<p>But mostly Arya.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Should Live In Salt

**Author's Note:**

> I promised myself that I wouldn't write any more Modern AUs. I lied.  
> Each planned chapter will cover one summer, with various ratings. I imagine all the age gaps narrowed but it's not really specific, so the usual directive of 'make the characters however old you want' applies. This is pretty fluffy imo, but there are some heavier themes of alcohol abuse and broken families under the surface so if that's triggering for you, proceed with care.
> 
> Please enjoy me attempting to write about sports that I don't know anything about.

He’d never seen the sea before. Not properly, not the pretty parts of it where trash didn’t wash up on jagged rocks and where the water stretched out clean as far as his eyes could see, unspoiled by ships and barges. Not where the sand was clean and white and only broken by the occasional twist of weathered driftwood or a pale shell. It made him feel small and insignificant. More than he usually did, anyway, though that might have been partly because of Robert, who clapped him on the shoulder and nearly laid him flat out on the sand he’d just been admiring.

“Prettier than Flea Bottom, eh?”

Gendry nodded. Of course, most things were prettier than Flea Bottom, but he didn’t have to tell that to his father, this red faced stranger who’d brought him here and insisted on calling him son.

On that first day, Gendry had almost wished Robert’s real family would have come in his stead, but Robert and Cersei weren’t together anymore, and that was half the reason he’d been invited in the first place. Robert needed a new family now that his had gone off and left him, and so Gendry thought maybe he’d decided to try and cobble one together from his other various cast-offs. That had left Gendry, after Mya and Bella had refused and Edric’s custody case was still undecided—that much had been explained to him in the car, though the names meant little enough to him. Mya, Bella, Edric. Strangers, just like Robert Baratheon, no more than lines on a jumbled tree that he couldn’t seem to sort out in his head.

Maybe Robert hadn’t meant to be such a shit dad. Maybe he’d just been as confused by the names as Gendry was.

The house itself stood tall and white, bleached by the sea wind and relentless sun like a bone left to the elements, rising out of the sand like a titan. It was massive—bigger than any house Gendry had ever been in before, and completely unfathomable to him. A house that big and only lived in a few weeks out of the year, left to sit empty when Gendry had been lucky to have any sort of roof over his head at all growing up, could have slept in a different room every night of the week if he’d had a house like that. It made his gorge rise, the flashy extravagance seemed almost a boast against the grey, choking polluted skies he’d left in Flea Bottom and the worn and tatty clothes he’d shoved into an old shopping bag to last him the two weeks he was meant to be on vacation.

Standing in the empty hallway and looking at the line of doors Gendry had felt bitter and sad. Robert had misread the look and laughed, the coarse sound echoing through the hollow guts of the house. “It won’t seem so big by this evening, I promise you that. You’ll be glad you’ve got first pick of the beds, but if you take one with a bunk in it you might find yourself sharing it with one of the Starks.”

Gendry did not take one with a bunk. He picked the one down at the end of the hall overlooking a scrubby bit of dune that he thought was rather pretty, and with a bed big enough that his heels wouldn’t hang off the edge. He stretched himself out on it and listened to the wind and the waves, the screeching sea birds off in the distance, and he tried to tamp down the tumult of feelings in his chest. He felt lonely, in that fancy room filled with things that didn’t belong to him. He felt homesick even though he’d only just arrived and he wasn’t very fond of home, either, but he knew it better than he knew Robert.

He was dreading the arrival of his father’s friends, with their passel of bratty children. He knew he’d be expected to play with them and be polite even if they were absolute assholes, and he was already half fuming about it before they’d even shown up, already anticipating the insults for his shabby clothes and the way he talked, the annoying way he’d be shoved in with the rest of them, like they were sure to be the best of friends. _Stupid_. He’d bet anything they were stupid, and he’d bet even more than this whole _thing_ was going to be stupid.

He fervently wished he was old enough to tell Robert to fuck off and leave him alone, and to call up one of his other forgotten kids when he needed to make himself look like a good father in front of his friends, but he wasn’t old enough or brave enough or sure enough about how he felt towards his dad to consider burning that bridge just yet. He just knew that he didn’t feel like he fit here any better than he did anywhere else and that he wasn’t like to ever feel like he fit, either, with a womanizing alcoholic for a father who only needed to act like a father two weeks out of the year, an inauspicious start to a relationship that had been about fifteen years too late.

He must have fallen asleep with his stupid thoughts and the sounds of the sea rushing in his ears. He woke to the doors slamming and his father’s bellowing echoing through the empty house, wondering where he was.

Gendry knuckled the sleep out of his eyes and stomped reluctantly down the stairs, disoriented by the strange setting and nearly tripping over a chair in the kitchen. There was already a small pile of luggage heaped by the door, and outside he could already see a flurry of activity as people poured endlessly out of the SUVs parked on the sand. When he opened the door, a dog the size of a draft mule bolted into the house past him, tongue lolling and a shower of sand scattering audibly on the hardwood floor under its paws. Gendry only just managed to muffle the expletive he’d been about to say as a woman he could only assume was Mrs. Stark came up to the door, attempting to negotiate a basket overflowing with towels, sunscreen, floppy brimmed hats, and brand new sandals that still smelled strongly of chemicals and rubber.

“Let me,” he said, holding open the door for her as she neared and reaching to help her with the basket. Another dog, this one black and wiry, came crashing in between them at the invitation.

“Oh, thank you—Shaggy, Shaggy NO. Go back outside, you pesky…”

“I’ll get him, mom!” shouted a small boy, darting in the door just behind the dog. “SHAGGY. COME HERE SHAGGY!”

The boy’s shrill shouts echoed even worse than Robert’s bellows, and Gendry winced.

“Rickon, don’t break anything, please. We’ve only just arrived,” said Mrs. Stark, in a weary voice that made Gendry think that maybe she said things like that a lot.

He lost track of how many dogs and children and articles of luggage came pouring in from outside. Two boys about his age nodded polite acknowledgement as they passed, one dark haired and the other redheaded, and another, older and surly, didn’t glance at him as he went by. A redhaired girl came nervously flitting in next, politely yelling at someone called Theon not to drop her things, please, while a light colored dog came right at her heels, gracefully stopping to shake the sand off its coat before trotting on through the house.

Gendry finally made it out the door and onto the beach in time to see his father and another man unloading a large ramp from the back of one of the SUVs. They carefully joined it to the wooden deck as a small boy emerged from the backseat with a pair of crutches and carefully began navigating the bit of sand he had to cross to reach the ramp as his father stayed close by his side.

He seemed to manage well enough, Gendry thought, what with the sand and all.

He felt awkward standing there watching without doing anything, and he didn’t know if he could stand feeling any more awkward than he already did without crawling out of his skin. A fresh wave of regret at coming here swept over him. He should have just stayed at home, but standing there wouldn’t make his situation any more enjoyable, so he hesitantly headed toward the open back of the vehicle to look for a cooler or something that needed moving.

Before he even looked inside the back, a pink suitcase dropped to the sand in front of his feet, sending a shower of grit over his toes.

“Oh look—another of Sansa’s,”

A head poked out over the top of the SUV and he realized there was a girl perched on top of the cargo rack, unfastening a series of cords and straps to release a wheelchair that had been folded flat and tied to the top.

“Do you need help?” he asked, not entirely sure what he was volunteering to help with.

She must not have seen him, either, and glanced down at him with a wide, apologetic smile. “Glad I didn’t hit you with that. Sansa brought a lot of shoes; that thing must weigh a hundred pounds.” She seemed unconcerned about the suitcase, which was laying lopsided and a bit uneven looking after its fall, but Gendry didn’t think you could break shoes from dropping them off the roof of a car. She waved her hand towards the wheelchair. “Could you help me with this? It’s, uh, not as heavy as shoes.”

He nodded and reached up to help her, and together they lifted it off the rack. Gendry set the chair carefully on the sand beside the suitcase, afraid he might damage it. That would hardly make for a pleasant vacation for any of them.

A moment later the girl clambered down from the roof and landed lightly on bare feet, just as quick and nimble as a squirrel, though squirrels had no place on the beach as far as Gendry knew. “Thanks,” she said. “I can get it myself, but it’s sort of clumsy for one person to manage.”

Gendry stared down at all of her, barely chest high next to him, and realized that that pink suitcase she’d nearly smashed him with probably outweighed her, shoes or not. “You unload that thing by yourself?”

“Yes?” She jerked her chin towards the door, where Rickon was trying to fit through alongside two dogs and the three of them had created a bottleneck that was preventing anyone from getting in or out of the house as Mrs. Stark tried to extricate her youngest son and the black dog from the tangle. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but things tend to get a bit chaotic with the six of us plus Theon, and he’s _useless_. You help where you’re needed, and I’d rather manage the wheelchair than the suitcases. I’m the best suited for climbing up after it. Except for Bran, but…” she trailed off, watching as her brother reached down around one of his crutches to shove his way through the dogs, who were excitedly panting and whining as they greeted him, apparently having already forgotten they’d all just spent some hours in the same car.

“Anyway, he’s stronger than he looks, and so am I,” she said, sticking her nose up in the air proudly, though it may have been just to see Gendry’s face better. She really was tiny, a strangely delicate little thing in spite of her scraped knees and the crooked bangs sticking to her forehead over stone-grey eyes, the funny way she furrowed her brows and wrinkled her nose while she eyed him back.

“You must be,” he told her. “They seem to have left the two of us to move all this stuff by ourselves.”

“Well, you _are_ big enough to carry most of it by yourself,” she pointed out.

 “I might be big but I’ve only got two hands.”

“It’s okay. They’ll be back in a minute. We’ve been trapped in a car all day; everyone is going to be running around the rest of the night arguing over beds and trying to find their suitcase. It happens every time we have a vacation.”

She was right. A moment later the door flew open again and what looked to be a small army emerged. It was like a bunch of ants had just had their nest stirred up.

“They can get their own suitcases,” she told him. “Just help me carry Bran’s wheelchair up to the deck,”

He could have carried it by himself, but she stubbornly grabbed hold of one of the wheels and stayed beside him as they trudged across the sand.

“What’s your name, anyway?”

“Gendry.”

“I’m Arya,” she offered. “I thought you must be Gendry. You don’t look like an Edric. And you definitely don’t look like Joffrey, which you ought to be grateful for.”

He laughed unexpectedly at the remark and she grinned back. “Don’t tell my sister I said that about Joffrey. Sansa’s got a crush on him.”

“What for?”

“Exactly.”

Gendry decided that Arya, at least, had some sense, and for the first time since his father picked him up he felt a little bit hopeful that the next two weeks wouldn’t be as bad as he had feared.

There was just one obvious thing that he had overlooked.

The first real day of vacation dawned sunny, clear, and bright, the sunlight streaming in through the bay windows warming the hardwood floors under his bare feet.

“Come swim with us,” Arya called to him, already wearing her swimsuit and chasing Rickon down the stairs with a bottle of sunblock. “We’ll wait, if you need to change.”

He had a pair of swim trunks that Robert had bought him in his room, the tags still on them from the department store they had stopped at for essentials on the way over. That would have been a good excuse to latch onto, if he’d conveniently done something as stupid as forget to bring swim trunks to the beach. But with Arya standing there staring at him expectantly while she slathered her brother with sun block he couldn’t come up with a good reason for declining.

Probably he could just stand with his toes in the tide and say it was too cold for swimming. And the sand felt nice on his feet; he could walk along the shore and look for shells and claim disinterest in the water if he had to. More than likely no one would even notice if he didn’t swim out very far with all the rest of them in the water, he decided. He could get his hair wet and then just act like he’d already been out where it was deeper. It couldn’t be that bad; after all, everyone wanted to go to the beach for vacation.

Only the net in his shorts seemed to have been sewn in crooked, he’d somehow wound up charged with hanging onto Rickon by the dinosaur-shaped inflatable donut around his waist while Arya carried an armful of towels, and the sand was hotter than it had been yesterday when he’d been out on it. Gendry didn’t dare complain though; Bran had put special feet onto his crutches and was picking his way across the beach with the rest of them, and he wasn’t complaining.

“Mom made us wait to go out,” Arya told him, dumping the bundle of towels onto a blanket that had been spread out on the sand. “Sucks. She let Robb and Jon and Theon go out first thing to make sure the water wasn’t too rough, but I swim as well as they do.”

“How did you learn how to swim so well?” he asked, staring reluctantly at the sea in front of them, which suddenly seemed very big and gray and menacing.

“Oh, I’ve always known,” Arya told him earnestly. “My mom used to teach swimming when she was younger, before she met my dad,” They’d used up all the beach and he found himself with seafoam frothing up onto his toes and waves sucking at his ankles. “Who taught you?”

Gendry glanced over at Sansa, who had set up a folding chair for Bran to sit on and at Rickon, who was several yards away smacking at the water while Shaggydog played next to him. “I don’t exactly…I can’t swim. At least, I think I can’t. I’ve never tried.” He confided in a low voice. “It isn’t hard, is it?”

“Not really,” she said, “Just don’t drown. I’ll show you.”

“Arya…” he started, as she grabbed him by the arm and pulled him behind her as she waded into the sea.

“It’s fine,” she soothed. “You’re tall. Just stand up.”

The water didn’t feel anything like he imagined. It was warmer than he’d expected and there were all sorts of things under his toes and churning around his calves, strings of seaweed and clouds of sand being washed in with the tide. It was hard to wade through it.

“It feels heavy,” he told her.

“It won’t in a minute. Not once we’re deep enough; then you’ll feel like a cork.” Arya promised.

A few yards further the water was waist deep and she was right, he did feel lighter. In a terrifying ‘I’m going to be lost at sea and swept out to a deserted island’ sort of way. He was suddenly afraid that she might decide the best way for him to learn to swim was to leave him there in the water, but even though it must have been too far out for her feet to touch bottom she stayed right beside him.

“There. Now, the next time a wave comes in, push up off the bottom when it’s just about to hit you. You’ll float,” she told him.

“I don’t know how to float.”

Arya’s eyes were intent on the water in front of them, keenly evaluating its patterns. “Doesn’t matter, you’ll still float. Get ready.”

And then the water was swelling and he could see it coming towards him implacably, blue, crystalline, and shining, and his last startled thought before he remembered to shove off from the bottom was that the water was at least beautiful, if it was going to be the last thing he ever saw. His timing was awful, but Arya was right, anyway, it didn’t really matter if he knew how to float; the water lifted him, buoying him along weightlessly for a handful of sparse seconds before it settled him back down to the sand and was gone, past them like it had never been there at all.

“See?”

“Is that it?”

“Well, no, not if you want to get anywhere. But that’s a good start at not drowning.”

Then she showed him how to make circles with his arms and legs to tread the water, and took him back to the shallows so he could see how she kicked off and smoothly cut through the water like a fish, her feet neatly pointed and her hands cupped to pull herself along. It looked easy, but when he tried it he found he didn’t quite have the rhythm or coordination to swim along as effortlessly as Arya could.

“It’s all right,” she told him, the water brushing the bottom of her chin affectionately as she treaded beside him. “If you have to, just roll over on your back like this,” she demonstrated, sprawling out on the surface. “That’s how to float the right way,” she offered, folding her arms and dropping back into a vertical position.

After practicing a while longer, after which she pronounced him to look clumsy but capable, they swam back toward the beach, where Sansa and Rickon were throwing a tennis ball for Shaggy to chase. Bran was swimming with them, though he wore a special belt around his waist covered with blocks of foam to help him float.

A ways up the beach Gendry saw that Jon, Theon, and Robb were watching the other swimmers from a bit of rocky outcropping that rose several feet out of the sea. “Do you think you could swim over to there?” she asked him, nodding towards the older boys.

“Do you think I could?” he countered.

“I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t,” she told him, rolling her eyes and shoving a wet strand of hair back off of her face. “It’s all the way across the cove but the water isn’t deep, and if you can swim out to the rock you should be able to swim anywhere you want to all along the beach.”

Gendry wondered if Rickon would let him borrow his inflatable dinosaur. “If I drown, tell them that there was a shark.”

“There aren’t any sharks anywhere near here, but I guess if it’s your last wish I could.”

At least there was that to be thankful for, he supposed.

It didn’t look like very far out to the rock, but it was harder swimming than it looked; and he felt a bit like the tide pushed him back more than he ever gained on the distance. Arya was still patiently beside him, though he thought it was likely that she had to slow down to keep from getting ahead of him.

There were little muscles he didn’t know that he had starting to feel tender in his shoulders and thighs when they finally made it, and he was glad that he might rest for a while on the wide shelves of stone, worn smooth from the elements and warmed by the sun. Arya had no such plans and scampered up the incline, leaving small, wet footprints all over it.

“Have you been diving without me?” she demanded of her brothers and ignoring Theon, who sat arrogantly at the head of the rock, preening like a seagull. Gendry had decided last night at dinner that he didn’t like Theon, who seemed to start every sentence with something related to his father’s yacht and was practically straining himself trying to look superior, though clearly he didn’t know that he had a long, boogery looking strand of kelp on his back.

“Only some,” Robb told her with chuckle, attempting to ruffle her wet hair as she ducked out of the way with a grimace. “Had to make sure it wasn’t too deep for our baby sister.”

“You know it isn’t!” she insisted.Her grey eyes narrowed and her smile turned predatory, but Robb noticed too late to keep himself from going over the side when she gave him a shove with a wicked laugh. 

From where Gendry sat it looked like Robb had vanished off the end of the earth in a blur of auburn hair and long, skinny legs, though the splash that came a second later and Arya’s laughter as she peered over at him said that he hadn’t.

“Is it too deep for you?” she shouted down at him innocently.

“Let’s go and see,” Jon said, and scooped a squirming Arya up in his arms before she could escape, and then they had vanished too, Jon’s laughter and Arya’s indignant shriek of protest fading into the sound of them hitting the water to Robb’s loud cheering. There was more laughing and happy shouting as they splashed at one another and Robb accused her of not playing fair, her retort lost as the water hit the rock next to where Gendry sat with a hiss.

He wondered to himself if his father had been better at being a father, and if he and his brothers and sisters had known one another, grown up together, if they would have played the same way; laughed the same as Arya and Jon and Robb, or if one of his older sisters would have taught him to swim when he was little, and stayed with him in the shallows like Sansa was doing with Bran and Rickon. He wondered what it was like to have a mother that wouldn’t let you go out swimming until after breakfast, who made sure you had your sunblock on before she let you out of her sight, or a father who wouldn’t be drunk before you made it back to the house for lunch, and who knew the names of all of his children.

He wondered what it was like to have a family, a _real_ one, but then Arya was bursting out of the sea beside him, redfaced and breathless from laughing, and all his thoughts of things he didn’t and couldn’t have were interrupted by her crashing straight through them.

She grabbed his hand. “Jump with me,” she coaxed. “I won’t let you drown, but if you do, I’ll tell them there were a hundred sharks and you punched the biggest one in the nose before it got you, and maybe you’ll get to be a story on shark week.”

It shouldn’t have been persuasive but he laughed in spite of himself, in spite of being a little afraid and only just having learned how to keep his head above the water, and he followed her. He followed her up the old, tired path, the sand that had been carried in by the waves and wind as soft and fine and white as sugar where it stuck to their feet.

When they reached the edge his breath caught, looking down into the sea, through the blue water to straight to the bottom. Little schools of tiny silvery fish scattered like stars and flashed in the light when they turned in confusion, waves broke around the suddenly insubstantial rock he stood on and filled the air with fine salt spray that he could taste when he took a breath, feel cling to his skin like a hundred little hands pulling him back.

He looked at her with trepidation and wonderment. _Is it safe?_   he should have asked, but for a moment it didn’t matter whether it was or not. 

She reached for his hand again, her fingers small and wrinkled against his palm.

“Just jump,” she said.

And Gendry jumped.


End file.
